POLICE armed response units called after an elderly resident reported an axe attack, found it was young people making a zombie film.

A full emergency response unit was sent to Tudor Court in Harrogate at 3.22pm yesterday, after the elderly woman dialled 999 reporting what she thought was a bloody axe attack by a group of youths.

She reported there was one male lying on the ground covered in blood with three others standing around, one of whom appeared to be holding an axe outside the Prince of Wales Mansions apartments.

Ambulance, police and armed response units were dispatched to the luxury apartment block – where North Yorkshire’s most expensive ever apartment was recently sold for more than £1m.

A spokesman for North Yorkshire Police said on arrival they could find no sign of the injured man or other members of the group and so began to conduct door-to-door enquiries and search nearby garages.

The young men, in their late teens, had been filming around the back of the flat, near some garages.

Eventually police knocked on the door of one house and were met by a teenager covered in fake blood, who said they had been trying to make a horror film.

He said: “At 4.05pm they found one of the youths and he confirmed they had been making a zombie film with what appeared to be fake blood.”

The armed response team was stood down.

A tweet from North Yorkshire Police Control Room, @NYPControl, about the incident has since been retweeted more than 150 times.